(*Editors Note | How can our White House go before the UN Security Council holding in one hand an accusation against Iraq of deception for failure to be forthcoming and in the other hand a report edited to protect US and other Western Corporations from scrutiny for roles in arming Iraq. It is absolute hypocrisy. How can our government hope to retain any credibility? Why is the White House protecting these corporations. How can we support war on these terms? -- ma.)
List Of US Firms That Armed Iraq Household Names
Democracy Now!
Wednesday, 18 December, 2002
Top-secret Iraq Report Reveals U.S. Corporations, Gov't Agencies and Nuclear Labs Helped Illegally Arm Iraq
Hewlett Packard, Dupont, Honeywell and other major U.S. corporations, as well as governmental agencies including the Department of Defense and the nation s nuclear labs, all illegally helped Iraq to build its biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.
On Wednesday, December 18, Geneva-based reporter Andreas Zumach broke the story on the US national listener-sponsored radio and television show Democracy Now! Zumach's Berlin-based paper Die Tageszeitung plans to soon publish a full list of companies and nations who have aided Iraq. The paper first reported on Tuesday that German and U.S. companies had extensive ties to Iraq but didn t list names.
Zumach obtained top-secret portions of Iraq's 12,000-page weapons declaration that the US had redacted from the version made available to the non-permanent members of the UN Security Council.
We have 24 major U.S. companies listed in the report who gave very substantial support especially to the biological weapons program but also to the missile and nuclear weapons program, Zumach said. Pretty much everything was illegal in the case of nuclear and biological weapons. Every form of cooperation and supplies was outlawed in the 1970s.
The list of U.S. corporations listed in Iraq's report include Hewlett Packard, DuPont, Honeywell, Rockwell, Tectronics, Bechtel, International Computer Systems, Unisys, Sperry and TI Coating.
Zumach also said the U.S. Departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce, and Agriculture quietly helped arm Iraq. U.S. government nuclear weapons laboratories Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia trained traveling Iraqi nuclear scientists and gave non-fissile material for construction of a nuclear bomb.
There has never been this kind of comprehensive layout and listing like we have now in the Iraqi report to the Security Council so this is quite new and this is especially new for the U.S. involvement, which has been even more suppressed in the public domain and the U.S. population, Zumach said.
The names of companies were supposed to be top secret. Two weeks ago Iraq provided two copies of its full 12,000-page report, one to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Geneva, and one to the United Nations in New York. Zumach said the U.S. broke an agreement of the Security Council and blackmailed Colombia, which at the time was presiding over the Council, to take possession of the UN s only copy. The U.S. then proceeded to make copies of the report for the other four permanent Security Council nations, Britain, France, Russia and China. Only yesterday did the remaining members of the Security Council receive their copies. By then, all references to foreign companies had been removed.
According to Zumach, only Germany had more business ties to Iraq than the U.S. As many as 80 German companies are also listed in Iraq's report. The paper reported that some German companies continued to do business with Iraq until last year.
posted on December 20, 2002 03:06:34 PMhttp://www.democracynow.org/Zumach2.htm Translations of Andreas Zumach's articles from the Berlin-based newspaper Die Tageszeitung that outline the contents of Iraq's top secret weapons report
[i]12/17/02: The report of the Iraqi government submitted to council last weekend contains names of more than 80 German companies, several private & publicly financed laboratories, as well as many individual German individuals who, since the second half of the 1970s, delivered complete construction sites, parts, ground substances, and technical know-how for Saddam Hussein's programs to develop nuclear, chemical & biological weapons, and ballistic missiles, as well as documenting the delivery of complete conventional weapons.
According to the report, in some cases the cooperation, at least in the conventional area, continued till at least the year 2001. This information stems from chapters of the Iraq report that contains relevant information on international procurement cooperation, in all four sections (chemical, biological, nuclear & missiles).[/i]
posted on December 20, 2002 03:09:27 PM
DeSquirrel,Maybe Im screwed up here,I must be thinking of Osama and his band of merry hoods. Drat! I cant even keep up with whos doing who anymore.
posted on December 21, 2002 07:51:06 AM
The hypocracy of this confrontation with Iraq never ends. With Saddam gone, American corporations will be in a position to dictate terms. Did you ever think that this was about anything else?
